It was here, in this onetime oyster bar, that Rupert Murdoch appointed Larry Lamb editor of his first British newspaper, a two-bit tabloid called The Sun, in 1968. That meeting opens James Graham’s play “Ink,” the prolific British playwright’s latest attempt to unpack Britain’s postwar history. “Ink” tracks The Sun’s rise to become Britain’s best-selling daily paper and the beginnings of Murdoch’s media empire that would, at its height, include Fox News and The New York Post.
During a recent lunchtime sitting, Bertie Carvel sat in one of Rules’ red velvet booths surveying the scene. “It is so redolent of the English establishment,” the actor said, scanning a menu for the meal he eats night after night onstage as Murdoch: a glass of Chianti and a fillet steak. “Rare,” he instructed the hovering waiter.
“He’s a young man with an enormous appetite,” Carvel offered, as if to rectify the image of Murdoch today, aged 88. “He eats his steak so rare it’s bloody.”
In “Ink,” which after an acclaimed run here is about to open on Broadway, you get the measure of Murdoch at mealtimes rather than in office hours. Carvel has him break every bit of table etiquette imaginable, tucking his napkin into his collar and talking as he chews. He guzzles wine, jabs his knife to gesticulate, then, exactingly, flicks a fleck of food off the tablecloth.
Rules, in Carvel’s estimation, was a place to rub others’ noses in it.
“As a blue-blooded Australian from a wealthy family, Oxford-educated, he both revered and reviled the British establishment,” Carvel said of Murdoch. “He’s a disrupter. His belief that rules are there to be broken is analogous with other, modern-day disrupters.”
By that, Carvel meant — among others — President Donald Trump, whose ear Murdoch is widely reported to have. The Sun sold so well because, relaunched under Lamb’s stewardship, it appealed to base popular tastes, lowering the tone of the Fleet Street press with sensationalist stories and photographs of topless models splashed on Page Three.
For Carvel, the resonance is clear. “It’s a play about populism,” he said, taking a sip of his Chianti. “It’s about what happens when you give people what they want. What happens when you court success in a certain way? What happens when you let the genie out of the bottle?”
In plays like “This House” and “Labour of Love,” Graham has focused on parliamentary politics. “Ink” widens the lens, scrutinizing the media landscape that holds so much sway.
Yet The Sun is still deemed, by some, a stain on British life, and Murdoch looms large in the public imagination. “He’s a sort of pantomime villain,” Carvel explained.
It takes a certain kind of actor to embody that onstage, and it’s telling that Carvel, a shape-shifter with a showman’s instincts, is the only member of the original British cast crossing the Atlantic with Rupert Goold’s production, which Manhattan Theater Club is presenting at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.
It brings the 41-year-old Londoner back to New York six years after his Tony Award nomination for his turn as Miss Trunchbull, the imposing headmistress (and ex-Olympian hammer thrower) who towered over “Matilda the Musical.”
“Matilda” director Matthew Warchus has described him as an old-school “nose putty actor,” referring to his relish for physical transformation. Carvel was, indeed, unrecognizable in the role. Buckled into a brown dress, hair wrenched into a bun, his “Trunch” was shrill-voiced, broad-shouldered and twinkle-toed.
Though he had led National Theater and Royal Court productions in London, “Matilda” cemented Carvel’s reputation as a singular, chameleonic performer. He has since been selective in choosing roles, ensuring each presented a fresh challenge. He was banshee-like in the Almeida’s “Bakkhai,” then a shaven-headed hulk in “The Hairy Ape” for the Old Vic. On-screen, he’s played eccentric wizards and suburban adulterers. Every part is idiosyncratic, completely original.
Serious, symmetrical and athletic under his black turtleneck, Carvel is a character actor with leading-man looks. As a teenager growing up in Hampstead, North London, he was a keen cosplayer, creating Dungeons and Dragons-style personas.
“I took great pride in having thousands of different characters,” he said, slicing into his steak. His flights of fancy offered an escape from his everyday (one ex-girlfriend gave him a mug embossed with the word “Dreamer”) and he admits to still feeling self-conscious today, more at ease when at play than in his own skin.
“I’m able to live parts of myself I otherwise can’t,” he said. “It’s not a disguise. I love getting into all these different corners of myself. I can be a prince, a princess, a pauper. There are a multitude of possible beings inside you.”
In an interview, Warchus stressed the “braininess” of Carvel’s approach.
“He has this hunger to turn everything into a study of human nature and its extremities,” the director explained. “It’s a paradox. He uses his head to find the heat — the passions and the pain of his characters — but he’s tamed his head enough to play.”
That rigor might also reflect his family origins. Carvel comes from a long line of newshounds — another reason he was so right for “Ink.” His great-grandfather wrote for The Star; his grandfather, for the Evening Standard; and he retains a “visceral” childhood memory of The Guardian newsroom where his father, John, worked for 36 years.
“Desks piled high with papers and phones and all sorts of mess,” Carvel recalled. The play’s set design brought it all rushing back: “I love the smell of newsprint,” he said.
Carvel might have followed a more creative path, but he sees an overlap between his storytelling and his father’s: “Imagination and truth, that’s not a dichotomy for me.” His process is part psychology, part journalism: rooted in research, but free to empathize.
“It’s not like if you read everything that had ever been written on your subject you’d automatically give a good performance,” he said. “The point of research is to reach the point where you can throw it away.”
The key, Carvel explained, is finding a character’s contradictions. His Murdoch might drive The Sun down-market, but he’s prudish about his editor’s proposals for Page Three. “Being prosaic, that’s what makes people people,” Carvel said.
He’s talked in the past about finding the man in the monster. Is there a monster lurking in Bertie Carvel?
“Oh yeah, of course,” he replied, straight away. “What’s that Oscar Wilde quotation? ‘Give a man a mask and he’ll tell you the truth.’” Carvel swilled the last of his nice Chianti. “I really do believe that.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.